Lanterns on the Levee: Recollections of a Planter's Son

by William Alexander Percy, Walker Percy (Introduction)

Born and raised in Greenville, Mississippi, within the shelter of old traditions, aristocratic in the best sense, William Alexander Percy in his lifetime (1885–1942) was brought face to face with the convulsions of a changing world. Lanterns on the Levee is his memorial to the South of his youth and young manhood. In describing life in the Mississippi Delta, Percy bridges the interval between the semifeudal South of the 1800s and the anxious South of the early 1940s. The rare qualities of this classic memoir lie not in what Will Percy did in his life—although his life was exciting and varied—but rather in the intimate, honest, and soul-probing record of how he brought himself to contemplate unflinchingly a new and unstable era. The 1973 introduction by Walker Percy—Will's nephew and adopted son—recalls the strong character and easy grace of "the most extraordinary man I have ever known."

Genres: Memoir, Biography, Nonfiction, History, Southern, School, Classics

348 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1941

About the author

William Alexander Percy was a Mississippi Delta planter, lawyer, poet, man of letters, and gentleman from Greenville, Mississippi. He is best known for his autobiography, Lanterns on the Levee, a book revealing not only the man but also the region, the times in which he lived, and the culture that shaped him.

Though he considered himself primarily a poet, his autobiography is today considered his major work. Spanning the years of his life — from his birth on May 14, 1885, to the book's publication in 1941 — Lanterns on the Levee looks upon the drastic social changes of that period with a sense of foreboding, upholding agrarian sensibility and the values of kindness, moral integrity, and friendship instead of what Percy perceived as the prevailing trends of declining moral values and technological progress.
He served as guardian to his cousin Walker Percy after the death of Walker's parents. He died on January 21, 1942.

He was awarded the French Croix de Guerre with gold star for his service in World War I; he also was one of the leaders in the successful 1922 fight against the Ku Klux Klan in Greenville; and he headed the local Red Cross unit during the disastrous Mississippi River flooding of 1927.

Reviews

[Jack Carver · Rating 5 out of 5]

Will Percy's generation could perhaps rival any for a claim to living through the greatest number of momentous events and tectonic societal changes. The fact that Percy directly participated in many of this era's most critical happenings and was born in a region more transformed than maybe any other would provide a writer far less talented than he with material to write a fascinating memoir. In Lanterns on the Levee, however, not only do we read testimony of a life lived fully in this remarkable period, but also find in Percy a superlatively eloquent and thoughtful witness.

Born in 1885 to a family of old Delta aristocrats, Percy was brought up in a society struggling to keep viable an economy and culture that had been in large part based and dependent on slave labor. We are with him as he participates in many of the remnants of that bygone age, and watch with him as its traditions and norms, both the lovely and the ghastly, slowly dissolve.

His youth was filled with intimate family gatherings in ancestral homes and unstructured adventures into the surrounding river country with friends of all races and classes. His education came largely via informal mentors and teachers who guided him through the classics that provide such color and depth to Percy's writing. Later he attended college in Sewanee and the Harvard Law School, eventually following his father into the life of a country lawyer and civic leader.

Bravely answering the call of WWI, he sought service on the front, and, after trying months spent fighting the bureaucracy that would have had him spend the war as an instructor, found it. His war stories are neither sentimental nor crafted to further pacifism. He freely admits the horror of the war, but is unwilling to deny that it fostered a special patriotic unity and that he indeed would have been deprived one of life’s signal experiences had he not fought.

Returning to the Delta he found new challenges and new foes. Fighting alongside his father, he vanquished the menace of a Ku Klux Klan attempting to extend its tentacles into the Delta country. Later he led the efforts to lessen the human suffering precipitated by the great Mississippi flood of 1927. During all of this he found time to become a poet of some note and a friend and counselor to the rich Delta characters that populate the book.

Situated in a region in which blacks outnumbered whites by ten to one, but in which the felicity of the supremacy of the latter was regarded as a self-evident, questions of race are never far from the author’s mind. As one may expect, Percy’s thoughts on these questions are retrograde. Nonetheless, it is clear that Percy had great affection for his black neighbors and was persistently occupied with ensuring their welfare. Being as lack of resources and education denied the black Delta folk the chance to record their own stories, Percy did a great service to posterity in putting a number of them in his book; they form some of its most entertaining portions.

Contemplative throughout, the book takes a decidedly meditative tone in its later pages. The chapter intended to provide guidance to the nephews he adopted (including the writer Walker Percy, who supplies the book’s beautiful introduction) is sublime in its advocacy for the good life of leisure, contemplation, artistic engagement, and virtue. It is inspiriting to read his conclusions on how life is best lived, being that he spent a lifetime deliberating that crucial question, which today, like much else from Percy’s era, has been largely banished and forgotten.

The final chapter faces mortality with clear eyes. Although perhaps underestimating his stature compared to the great mass of humanity, he concedes with honesty that whatever memory of him his writing may for a time preserve, his eventual destiny is to be forgotten. In the closing sentences he convincingly expresses ease with this reality, so long as he shares oblivion with his beloved mother and father, his other relatives and friends, and all the other Delta folk who so enriched his time on earth. Percy died at age 55 only months after the publishing of this book. Whether he knew of his impending death while writing, I do not know and have not been able to find out. Perhaps all that knew the answer are now with him, gone and on their way to being forgotten if not already there. To me there is a curious solace in that.

[E. B. · Rating 5 out of 5]

For years, my family boasted that we are related to William Alexander Percy, "famous writer and poet of the South," but I didn't know anyone who had read any of his work. Now that I have read this book, I find myself wanting to proudly acknowledge our lineage. This is the kind of material that inspires me to write - now if I only had a smidge of Percy's gift of prose! Having grown up in the Louisiana Delta, I feel a connection with Percy's experiences, though he published this 19 years before my birth. I believe that he accurately represents the social, racial, and financial issues of his day. Then he saves the best for last, giving us his philosophical thoughts on religion and gardening. Read this book for a Southern plantation owner's perspective and enjoy remarkable imagery in Percy's writing.

[Cooper Word · Rating 4 out of 5]

I guess all you can ask of an autobiography is for someone to share their perspective openly, honestly, and authentically, and he definitely did that! This is his ranking of everybody he considers relevant in the Delta:

1. Rich white men
2. Black men
3. Poor white men

I read this to get a better idea of his perspective on race, class, and power, and he delivered that, in all of its weirdness and nuance and paradox. He is an avowed white supremacist and believes in the superiority of white people, but also loves Black people dearly. And I’m actually sure I believe him that he does. He fought HARD against the KKK and kept them out of Washington County, and multiple times went to court representing Black victims of police brutality. He loves them, but he does not respect them.

Which I think is my main takeaway. Love is nothing, and actually can be harmful, if it is not accompanied by respect for the other as equal to your self. And the only people Percy respected as equal to him were rich white men. I just don’t think he really ever understood how much he misunderstood of people because of the person he was to them, even if he was trying his best.

Interesting book. Some awfully terrible takes in here, but on the whole, I like knowing I understand his perspective a little more.

[Jeffrey Fracher · Rating 3 out of 5]

Though rationalized as consistent with the era in which he grew up, this memoir is notable for the paternalism toward African-Americans and outright racism presented as sociological insights. Sadly, the views expressed by Percy are still pervasive in the South.

[Ben Skeen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was first introduced to this book when I was an undergraduate at the University of the South, Percy’s alma mater. Percy writes a long poetic chapter about Sewanee that makes its way into every publication that the University releases. When I was visiting the South’s most famous book store, Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi, and saw this book, I knew that I had to buy it. I was blown away by the prose. Percy is a poet, and his sentimental turns of phrase are simply beautiful. Perhaps the book is sentimental to a fault. I think that I have probably lost some of my love for the book since I have moved back to Colorado, and since I realized that I was not going to be a poet. Still, I turn to it whenever I need a nice turn of phrase. The book is, unfortunately, marred by some material in the end about the relationship between whites and blacks in Mississippi that has been dated significantly. If you can realize that that chapter is a product of the author’s time, I think that you will enjoy the book.

[John · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was a tough one to read. Not because of its prose (once you get used to the style, it is very well-written) but because of his racial attitudes. Percy, a creature of this time and the son of an old planter family in the Mississippi delta, is living the unexamined life. While he pays lip service to the idea that slavery was bad, he wholeheartedly supports white supremacy. He believed that seizing ballot boxes to preserve this was an unqualified good and grants African-Americans no agency. He is very prickly about any criticism of his views, especially regarding his efforts in charge of the Red Cross relief effort in Greenville MS during the flood of 1927. Of course it is outside agitators (the Chicago Defender) that caused problems with the African American population forced to settle on the levee (unlike the whites, who were evacuated to Natchez). Percy claims he was out-maneuvered by the planters, but he went along nevertheless.

I've been curious about this book for some time (I admire the works of his cousin Walker Percy) but I cannot recommend it for the general reader.

[DoctorM · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fine elegiac piece by a one of the last of his class... A memoir of growing up in the Mississippi as a member of a dying planter class--- by a scion of a liberal Southern family whose biography (poet, planter, decorated combat soldier, sometime lawyer, traveler, admirer of beautiful boys) is worth a novel and and a film...

[Willow Culpepper]

I read this for research. Do not trust anyone who has read this book outside of research reasons. This book has a suspiciously high rating on goodreads for being a deeply racist justification of sharecropping.

[Erika · Rating 3 out of 5]

For better or for worse, an exceptional snapshot of the life of Delta planters in the early 20th century.

[Cameron Barham]

“Perhaps (a Southern philosophy of life) is all contained in a remark of Father’s when he was thinking aloud one night and I sat at his feet eavesdropping eagerly:
“I guess a man’s job is to make the world a better place to live in, so far as he is able-always remembering the results will be infinitesimal-and to attend to his own soul.”, p. 75

[Harry Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

William Alexander Percy’s Lanterns on the Levee reads like William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience (which I have not read), with the first twelve chapters resembling an innocent rhapsody and the latter fifteen a world-weary dirge. The turning point comes with Percy’s father’s involvement in politics in 1910-12, with World War One, conflict with the Ku Klux Klan in 1922, and the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 making any return to Innocence impossible. Adding a jarring element to the chapters on Experience is Percy’s rather defensive discourse on race relations.

(As for the supposedly unique traits of a certain subset of the Mississippi population, listed in the aforesaid discourse, I find them to be rather universal. For example:

The last time I saw Mims I asked him how he and his wife were getting along. He poked out his mouth: ‘Pretty good, pretty good, I reckon. Cose I always goes up the front steps whistlin’.’

I praised his cheerfulness.

‘That ain’t it, Mr. Will. I want to give anybody what’s in the house and don’t belong there time to git out the back way. You know I never did like no rookus.’ [pp. 301-302]

The same principle is outlined by Fielding:

It hath been a custom long established in the polite world, and that upon very solid and substantial reasons, that a husband shall never enter his wife's apartment without first knocking at the door. The many excellent uses of this custom need scarce be hinted to a reader who hath any knowledge of the world; for by this means the lady hath time to adjust herself, or to remove any disagreeable object out of the way; for there are some situations in which nice and delicate women would not be discovered by their husbands. [Tom Jones, X/ii])

I liked the first part, concerning Innocence, much better. It’s amazing that Percy, writing at the experienced age of fifty-five, is able to recreate so pristinely the intoxicating wondrousness of his youth:

To climb an aspen sapling in a gale is one of those ultimate experiences, like experiencing God or love, that you need never try to remember because you can never forget. Aspens grow together in little woods of their own, straight, slender, and white. Even in still weather they twinkle and murmur, but in a high wind you must run out and plunge among them, spattered with sunlight, to the very center. Then select your tree and climb it high enough for it to begin to wobble with your weight. Rest your foot-weight lightly on the frail branches and do most of your clinging with your arms. Now let it lunge, and gulp the wind. It will be all over you, slapping your hair in your eyes, stinging your face with bits of bark and stick, tugging to break your hold, roaring in your open mouth like a monster sea-shell. The trees around you will thrash and seethe, their white undersides lashed about like surf, and sea-music racing through them. You will be beaten and bent and buffeted about and the din will be so terrific your throat will invent a song to add to the welter, pretty barbaric, full of yells and long calls. You will feel what it is to be the Lord God and ride a hurricane; you will know what it is to have leaves sprout from your toes and finger-tips, with satyrs and tigers and hounds in pursuit; you will never again need to drown under the crash of a maned wave in spume and splendor and thunder, with the white stallions of the sea around you, neighing and pawing. (p. 55)

While looking back, again, with a seamless fidelity to youthful feeling, on how he expanded his consciousness in youthful Arcadia (meaning the liberal arts), Percy is conscious, with the advantage of hindsight, of Arcadia’s true meaning:

Neither from experience nor observation can I quite say what they learn in their Arcadia, though they gad about freely with books and pads. Indeed, many of them attempt to assume a studious air by wearing black Oxford gowns. In this they are not wholly successful, for, no matter how new, the gowns always manage to be torn and insist on hanging from the supple shoulders with something of a dionysiac abandon. Further, even the most bookish are given to pursuing their studies out under the trees. To lie under a tree on your back, overhead a blue and green and gold pattern meddled with by the idlest of breezes, is not – despite the admirable example of Mr. Newton – conducive to the acquisition of knowledge. Flat on your stomach and propped on both elbows, you will inevitably keel and end by doting on the tint of the far shadows, or, worse, by slipping into those delightful oscillations of consciousness known as cat-naps. I cannot therefore commend them for erudition. So it is all the more surprising that in after years the world esteems many of them learned or powerful or godly, and that not infrequently they have been the chosen servitors of the destinies. Yet what they do or know is always less than what they are. Once one of them appeared on the first page of the newspapers because he had climbed with amazing pluck and calculated foolhardiness a hitherto unconquered mountain peak, an Indian boy his only companion. But what we who loved him like best to recall about that exploit is an inch cube of a book he carried along with him and read through – for the hundredth time, likely – before the climb was completed. It was Hamlet. Another is immortal for cleansing the world of yellow fever, but the ignorant half-breeds among whom he worked remember him now only for his gentleness, his directness without bluntness, his courtesy, which robbed obedience of all humiliation. Still others I understand have amassed fortunes and – to use a word much reverenced by my temporal co-tenants – succeeded. That success I suspect was in spite of their sojourn in our greenwoods. The Arcadians learn here – and that is why I am having such difficulty telling you these things – the imponderables. Ears slightly more pointed and tawny-furred, a bit of leafiness somewhere in the eyes, a manner vaguely Apriline – such attributes though unmistakable are not to be described. When the Arcadians are fools, as they sometimes are, you do not deplore their stupidity, and when they are brilliant you do not resent their intellectuality. The reason is, their manners – the kind not learned or instilled but happening, the core being sweet – are far realer than their other qualities. Socrates and Jesus and St. Francis and Sir Philip Sidney and Lovelace and Stevenson had charm; the Arcadians are of that lineage. (pp. 100-101)

Apparently, Percy is drawn to trees, especially the familiar species of his youth, and when among them, he is drawn to the second person! However, when among scenes of foreign beauty, as on his year abroad, the familiar second person is beyond his reach, and thus he discovers a superlative form of loneliness. (This is a real 於我心有戚戚焉 for me, who discovered loneliness on the coastal highways and in the art museums of remote realms, desperately missing a sharer or co-appreciator of all the beauty I found):

At the sight or sound of something unbearably beautiful, I wanted desperately to share it. I wanted with me everyone I’d ever cared for – and someone else besides. (p. 112)

There are racist words in this book, so don’t read it.

[Frank Murtaugh · Rating 3 out of 5]

I first read this memoir in my twenties. It's a very different experience from the perspective I now occupy, that of a man near the age Percy was when he wrote the book (published in 1941) . . . a year before his death. It's eloquent, and has touching chapters, particularly on Percy's family and the role they played in rejecting the KKK in Greenville, Mississippi, and working tirelessly in the relief efforts during/after the great flood of 1927. But Percy's views on race relations — utterly racist, it must be said — make this a hard book to finish. A hard book to process, here almost 80 years later when racism remains humanity's true plague (even in a time of pandemic). I'd like to think the author would have evolved had he lived longer, had he heard Dr. King, had he seen the efforts of John Lewis and so many others in the civil rights movement that is still being fought. For he was a wise man in other areas. One passage is purely chilling in the context of 2020 America: "It was an example of Nazi propaganda before there were Nazis. The very enormity and insolence of the lie carried conviction to the simple and the credulous."

[Amanda Roa · Rating 4 out of 5]

A companion book to The Rising Tide.

This is another view of. the great flood of 1927 and life in the Mississippi Delta as told through the eyes of the white aristocratic Southern Gentleman. It is limited in its wisdom by the era in which this man lived, but it gives clear insight into the mind of a well educated white gentleman, who lived during trying times in a culture that no longer thrives. He is at his most eloquent towards the end of the book when he talks of the end of life and what living a single life means on this earth. After reading this I wondered how Will Percy's view of the differences between the races will have changed if he could witness our modern times and the advancement of the individual person, regardless of color of skin in all areas of life. Be prepared to cringe in parts of this memoir. Nonetheless, I am glad I read it.

[Missyjohnson1 · Rating 2 out of 5]

I am glad that I did not start this book by reading the essay entitled "A note on Race Relations". Having some context from the previous essays allowed for a bit of understanding as to where the author was coming from with his words. It is sad to think that such a truly short time ago, (1930-40's) that the white superiority and male supremacy attitudes were so pervasive. I guess that I should not be surprised as we are still fighting that battle. As much as William Percy thought that he was on the side of equality of men, he had not worked out in his own mind the idea that ALL men (and women) are created equal AND in the image of GOD. We still have so far to go and work to do as to treating each other and brothers and sisters in Christ.

[Diane · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an autobiography of Walker Percy's uncle, who was born in the late 19th century in the Mississippi Delta, and was writing near the end of his life, on the eve of World War II. He has a nice writing style, as he was a poet. He provides some little known insights into the region's history. He focuses on the region around New Orleans, which I'm not all that familiar with. He has an interesting chapter on the 1927 flood, although I thought he could have gone into more detail about that event and its aftermath. He defends the "aristocratic" South of his youth, and continually expresses contempt for African Americans and poor whites, which I found very off-putting. He does talk in depth about some of the legitimate challenges that the region faces, but he doesn't seem to consider that his own class' obsession with holding on to its power may have exacerbated many of these problems. He was born two decades after the Civil War, yet doesn't think it strange that the community has made no efforts to educate the freed slaves and their children, or to uplift the region's poor whites. He complains about the problems associated with having such a large uneducated, unruly population, but doesn't really consider what might improve their situation. That said, I found the book provides insight into the contemporary South, and into contemporary American politics as well.

[Pamela · Rating 4 out of 5]

While William Alexander Percy was a poet during his lifetime as well as a Mississippi planter and lawyer he is most noted for this, his memoir of growing up in the Mississippi Delta. He is also remembered for taking in and raised his cousin's orphaned children the oldest of which was the celebrated author Walker Percy who wrote the award-winning The Moviegoer.

Lanterns On the Levee is a lovely tribute by Percy to his father and mother, His hometown of Greenville and the way he was raised. Many of the things he talks about, especially the race relations of his time and the attitudes towards "the Nego race"; his own views on the subject are so dated as to be particularly annoying but at least there is an underlying tone of respect and kindness if not an admittance of equality. Fortunately, this is not a major part of his memoir and mostly it is a collection of anecdotes of teachers, friends, politicians, etc., in his life and major events. These include the Great War, of course, but also the 1927 flood, his education in the North at Harvard Law School and some of his traveling. But the best reason of all to read Lanterns On The Levee is the rare pleasure of Percy's beautiful use of the English language.

[Anni Kramer · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great book on the South as experienced by the author William Percy in his recollections of a planter's son. First published in 1941, it gives an excellent account of life in the South at the end of the 1800's and events like the first world war and life in the Mississippi Delta during the great flood of 1927. The author's humor continually had me laughing. His views as a white aristocratic southern gentleman on the blacks working on the plantations at that time are in line with thought at that time, which we also read, for example, in Harper Lee's To Set A Watchman. But at the same time, there is compassion in Percy's views, both for the blacks and for his own culture that is starting to decline. His account of his service in the war is neither sentimental nor does he drown in self-pity. His is a tone of self-criticism and understatement. I thoroughly enjoyed the book.
I deducted a star, not for the author, but because of the vast number of typos the book contains. I don't think it was edited before it was published, and I can't agree with Amazon's claim it is reprinting classic books like this in high quality and modern edition. Seems no one at Amazon bothered to read through the text before it was printed.

[Chris]

I am not going to give stars because I could give 4 or 0 stars depending upon the criteria I used to rate this book. The writing at times is beautiful, with moments of genuine profound reflection. But then he offers in determined and eloquent speech a defense of an indefensible view of white supremacy, even if he sees that supremacy in terms of his responsibility as a superior person to the inferior race. This viewpoint is one I have heard before, but it has been a while, and it took me aback. I don't know whether to recommend the book or not. It is interesting, and he led an interesting life, and the book was written in 1941, I believe, so it is hard in one way to apply modern sensibilities to a patrician Southern viewpoint in that day. But it was disturbing to me as a Southern white man to read much of the last 15% of the book in particular, and I would think it would be disturbing no matter one's race, gender, social status, or origin of birth.

[Rhuff · Rating 4 out of 5]

It might be subtitled the "memoirs of a reactionary." Yet though William Alexander Percy was a racist by any standard, he was not the vengeful Klan-sheeted redneck anxious to keep his bottom rail on top. Percy the younger was the prince of an old Delta family, his father a famous "progressive" planter and politician who led the elite opposition to the state's leading race-baiter, James K. Vardaman. Thus Percy saw himself as a "realist" Progressive, content in treating folks fairly on an individual basis if they're worthy of it, eschewing any broad social resolutions.

The book is peppered with his askance view of "the herd," first ascendant with Vardaman and now the norm of the era under Nazis and Bolsheviks, all a threat to the "Southern way of life" - that is, his own. HIs racial views will choke any modern reader, yet again it's too convenient to lump him with the Archie Bunkers whom he despised with utter class contempt. No doubt Percy would have no mercy upon the MAGAite masses could he have seen them.

Blacks were simple, good-natured folk - too good for their own good, the happiest people on earth if left alone by outside agitators, white and black. Even if guilty of grand theft or homicide their lack of premeditation is seen as a saving virtue. But he could be caustic, as when he upbraided a churchful of resentful black men during the Great Flood of '27, for being ungrateful at all the hard and selfless work being done for them by the Red Cross. "In giving, men may be less than angels, but in taking become outright devils." According to the tale, they accepted the due criticism. As did the helpless, dependent lackey named Ford who - despite every string Percy pulled in his favor - always bungled up; until one night he burst into Percy's house and cried face-down on the sofa, "I ain't never gonner be nuthin' but jest Fode." Percy could take the home invasion with good grace: it confirmed his own attitudes perfectly.

His economy was what one should expect of a Delta scion born in 1885: sharecropping is a fair system that encourages thrift and enterprise, but if you lose it's OK because you have nothing to lose anyway (because it's all been stripped of you beforehand to make you desperate enough to work under a "50-50" regime where all expenses are deducted from your half, and mine are met from the twenty other halves I own outright.)

But for all his feudalism, Percy at the end praises the Mississippi flood relief program of '27 because "our people learned mutual helpfulness instead of the tenets of the Klan . . . and our government learned the necessity of flood control." This was indeed a precursor for the New Deal, under which Percy completed his memoir in 1940. Put this beside his warm Old Southern tale of the ex-slave who killed a Yankee officer for insulting his former master, and you have the contradictory essence of W. A. Percy: "progressive" feudalist, Klan-hating racist, Catholic in the Bible Belt, gay man deep in a closet for all the Delta's wide open land and sky.

As a side note on the '27 river flood, Percy observes that the old levees were much lower and allowed the river a mild "overflow," soon receding with no drowning or wreckage. But modern development demanded more land, with none allowed to waste, so new high levee walls pushed the river back and higher: so when the levee "boils" worked their way to burst through the earthworks the carnage was on an Egyptian scale, like the Red Sea deluge of Pharoah. This explains the devastation wrought on New Orleans by Katrina, and we'll likely see more of the same.

An interesting period-piece reading, but *not* for the easily-offended wokester.

[Nancy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lanterns on the Levee: Recollections of a Planter’s Son / William Alexander Percy. I’m not sure I can analyze entirely what makes this memoir, published first in 1941, representative of my father’s generation, but it certainly is. Conservative by today’s standards and nostalgic for me. The chapters on his family, his education, and WWI were engaging but he was intolerably misguided in terms of race relations. Percy’s patronizing consideration and his innate sense of superiority are unacceptable now. The book is a class act in terms of social stratification, as well as its literary quality.

[Shane Orr · Rating 3 out of 5]

Percy was a world traveling plantation owner and attorney and a decorated World War I veteran who led flood relief efforts and fought the Klan. Interestingly, this Percy raised his nephew Walker Percy, who wrote The Moviegoer, a book I read a couple years ago. It took me a bit to get used to his writing style, and you have to overlook his outlook on race (though he was quite progressive for his time), but his beautiful writing is a fascinating window into a South caught between the old traditions of the post-Civil War era and the new world of the approaching mid-20th century.

[Jim Woolwine · Rating 4 out of 5]

The autobiographical portion of the book was a good read. Ratification of the 17th Amendment ejected the author's father - appointed to the position by the legislature - when the electoral process changed to popular vote. The author's role in organizing the citizenry following the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 showed impressive leadership, though in hindsight his treatment of the Negro majority was questioned. And what a flood that was. The levees grow from 4' to 40' following the flood. Small town society and politics. The few end chapters on race relations are sad.

[Jan1243 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Probably one of the best books I’ve ever read. A true writer of truth. He writes not from subterfuge or superiority, but through love of a place and a time, with clarity and wisdom. He has been a student of observation, wonder, and imagination — a product of his own time, , yes, but a visionary as well. What beautiful prose and thoughtful language. I’m now contemplating my inner jackdaw. Beautiful...

[Amy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a gem. Born in 1885, life through the eyes of an Harvard educated lawyer/ WWI soldier/ poet/ traveler, etc, and a lifelong resident of the Mississippi Delta.

William Percy was self-deprecating and insightful and his writing heart-felt and often funny, he expresses perspectives not allowed to be expressed today. Agree with him or not, it's refreshing to read content uncensored by todays thought police and his word-smithing, truly beautiful.

[Ladywinkfield · Rating 4 out of 5]

Whilst I enjoyed this book I did find it in parts, excruciatingly dull. William Percy has a story to tell, and writes it beautifully but sometimes his descriptions dump too much detail into the prose obscuring the point. It's a memoir that doesn't flow well. As others have noted, there is racism, it is a memoir of its time but I think his desire for a more equitable world is obvious. Plenty of annoying typos in the Kindle edition.

[Garrett · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rarely, do I rate a book five stars, but this autobiography of a a man “at law undistinguished, at teaching unprepared, at soldiering average, at citizenship unimportant, at love second-best, at poetry forgotten before remembered…” is an enthralling read from start to finish.

William Alexander Percy was a Delta man who curiously loved life and could beautifully articulate that life.

[M Carolyn Good · Rating 4 out of 5]

Percy dynasty

William Percy writes about his life in Greenville, Mississippi as part of a well known dynasty. A southern white supremacist poet and world traveler in the early 20th century, he shares in a sensitive style.

[AM · Rating 5 out of 5]

Contains much truth, yet definitely antiquated: "[O]n the other hand, it is hardly proper to judge a man's views on the issues of his day by the ideological fashions of another age." Percy saw the modern age as the Götterdämmerung of Western (and particularly Southern) values.

[Leslie · Rating 1 out of 5]

The only thing I got from this was the honest look inside of a wealthy privileged southern “intellectual “/ poet who blithely makes sweeping stereotypes and generalizations about blacks. Granted, he lived in the early 20th century. But it’s shocking to read today. No thanks, Mr. Percy.

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wanted to read this book mainly due to my interest in the Great Flood of 1927 but I found that the entire thing was fascinating. I loved the beautiful phraseology and analogies. Living not far from the Delta, I was really transported to another place and time.